In October 1927, Virginia Woolf began to write her first biography.At that time, her creative career was at its peak, and she had just finished the novel "To the Lighthouse". She wanted to change her mind and try to write a "funny" biography in a relaxed and humorous style.The writing of the book was very smooth, and it was completed in March 1928, which lasted less than half a year.In this biography, the hero Orlando is a young British aristocrat who is male for the first thirty years of his life and becomes female after thirty.He/she spans four centuries, is androgynous, immortal, and has experienced nearly four hundred years of life from Elizabeth I to Queen Victoria.When he was a teenager, he was favored by Queen Elizabeth I, and later he went to Turkey as a diplomat.After the sex change, she remarried as a wife and had children.He/she admires nature and loves poetry. He wrote the poem "The Big Oak Tree" with his whole life and became a famous female poet in Queen Victoria's era.However, when "The Big Oak Tree" won the prize, she almost sadly buried the book under her beloved big oak tree.After publication, the sales volume reached 8,000 copies within six months, more than twice the sales volume of "To the Lighthouse" in the same period, and became Woolf's best-selling work.

As a stream-of-consciousness novelist, Virginia Woolf's achievements in literary creation are generally considered to be mainly reflected in her several stream-of-consciousness novels.But Woolf was equally astounding in her exploration of new forms of biography.Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen (Leslie Stephen), was a famous British biographer in the 19th century. Under the influence of his father, Woolf read a large number of biographical works since childhood. , forming her own unique new biographical view.Woolf has a lot of achievements in biographical criticism, theory and practice in her life. Her exploration of new biographical forms is influenced by the biographical views of Romantic writers in the 19th century to a certain extent.At that time, there was a discussion on biographical literature theory in the British literary circle around James Boswell's "Life of Johnson" (1791).Romantic writers, represented by John G. Lockhart and Samuel T. Coleridge, criticized Boswell's fact-based biography, arguing that biographers are not historians, As a kind of literary art, biography should not only focus on the external behavior and objective facts of the subject, but also express the inner emotional world of the characters.Woolf once said in the article "The Art of Biography" that biographers should be allowed to "write like a novel on the basis of facts." She believes that new biographies should no longer be burdened by the so-called facts of the subject, but rather The fictional elements should be boldly incorporated, even the imagination and emotion of the biographer, so as to more effectively show the personality of the subject and make the biography more real.It is Woolf's writing experiment based on her new view of biography.

It is Woolf's first work titled "biography", and it is also an unconventional experiment in anti-traditional biography.In a letter to her friend, she talked about her desire to write in a "revolutionary" way. She wrote: "I suddenly thought of a method that can revolutionize biographical writing overnight." Edited by Zhang Jingyuan, Contemporary Feminist Literary Criticism [M], Beijing: Peking University Press, 1992, p. 40.So, what is this "method"?Analyzing her narrative strategy, it can be found that Woolf's "revolutionary" anti-traditional biographical writing strategy is to agree with traditional biography in external form, but subtly change the core elements supporting traditional biography, just as she in Written in: There was a traveler who had a large bundle of contraband hidden in the corner of his suitcase, which was hastily let through by careless customs officials. "Had the Zeitgeist examined the thoughts in her head, it might have found something gravely forbidden hidden therein, and punished her severely for it. She was doing nothing but subterfuge . . . to show obedience to the Zeitgeist, was able to narrowly escape inspection," see page 211 of this book.This is the subtle transaction between the writer and the spirit of the times.The deal between Woolf and the British biographical tradition was accomplished through this strategy of seemingly compromising but actually resisting.

The first thing to be stolen is the identity of the master.Most of the subjects of traditional British biographies are male kings, ministers, heroes or dignitaries, while most women are difficult to obtain the qualifications to set up monuments.Orlando was able to be included in the biography, to a certain extent, met the qualification requirements of the traditional biography for the hero, because at the beginning of the chapter, he was "undoubtedly" male, and as a nobleman, he had a prominent family background and could be regarded as a relative of the emperor. .However, after obtaining the qualifications to enter the biographies, the biographer transformed into a woman, and her family was poor, so she was a poet at best.If you look at his life, he is a bisexual person who is a homosexual and a heterogeneous person that is not tolerated by social orthodoxy.However, Orlando's use of a social heterogeneous identity as the hero completely overturned the stereotypes of traditional biographies in the orientation of the hero's identity.

Second is the narrative form.In terms of narrative form, it seems to strictly follow the so-called linear narrative mode of traditional biographies, starting from the hero's youth, and narrating the hero's life in chronological order.However, Woolf used the difference between "psychological time" and real time to extend the hero's life to nearly four hundred years, which is completely contrary to the real situation of human physiological time in real life.The traditional biography only records the life of the subject’s biological time concept, and expands it to the life of the psychological time concept. This exaggerated way emphasizes the importance of the character’s psychological consciousness activities in the biography, thus overturning the time concept of the traditional biography. reality and historical significance.

Third, the narrative content.Traditional biographies generally focus on recording real events, and present the so-called objective reality to readers in a seemingly objective and fair narrative method.Whether or not the "facts" of the biography's life are recorded in detail and objectively is often the criterion for judging the success of a biography.Although it is self-deprecatingly stated that the material on which it is based, "whether private documents or historical records, can meet the basic needs of the biographer, so that the biographer can follow the indelible footsteps of the facts, without distraction. ” See page 44 of this book.But on the other hand, it also finds a perfect excuse for the biography to have to borrow fiction and imagination. One of the excuses is that some plots lack historical materials recorded in writing, while other historical documents that are well documented have been ruthlessly destroyed by the fire. The second pretext is: the subject is a woman, and "when we describe a woman's life, it is generally believed that we can omit her actions and only talk about love. A poet once said that love It's the whole way of being a woman."See page 213 of this book.Therefore, those elements that cannot be tolerated by traditional biography: fiction, imagination, psychological description, emotional expression, etc., have all entered the hall of biography with confidence under these two plausible excuses.

It is not Woolf's first attempt to subvert traditional biography with absurd and witty writing.The Corridor of Friendship, which she created in 1907, may be regarded as her earliest attempt at the new biographical narrative mode.The absurd and humorous style of writing, as well as the blending of reality and imagination, fact and fiction, have begun to take shape in "The Corridor of Friendship", but they are more skillful and confident in "The Corridor of Friendship".Because of its subversion and parody of the traditional biographical model, it is also called "imitation biography", but the term "imitation biography" actually degrades or obliterates Woolf from the traditional standpoint of traditional biography. Try the groundbreaking sense of a new biography.Underneath the absurd, humorous and light-hearted narrative surface is Woolf's serious thinking on the form and essence of reality and imagination, truth and fiction, novel and biography, which is where both solemnity and humor lie.

The prototype of the protagonist is generally considered to be Woolf's friend Vita Sackville-West (Vita Sackville-West), because there are too many connections with Vita.First of all, Woolf wrote in her diary in early October 1927 that she was going to write a biography of Vita entitled "Orlando", but the gender had to be changed. John Lehmann, Virginia Woolf, Thames and Hudson, 1975, p.62. Secondly, when it was published, the person who dedicated it was Vita; thirdly, most of the main photos used in the book were Vita’s photos; Fourth, the country manor where Orlando lives is also described with reference to the Knole House (Knole House) where Vita lived since childhood; fifth, Vita’s son once said that it was Woolf’s love letter to his mother .Of course, the more important connection is that Vita's own life experience, identity, temperament and personality preferences are quite similar to the hero Orlando.Vita was a British novelist and poet in the Victorian period. Like Orlando, although she was born in an old British noble family and her father was a lord, her family blood was mixed with non-noble blood.Vita is a talented female poet. Like Orlando, she likes to cross-dress and has bisexuality. Although she is a woman, she shows obvious masculine characteristics in psychology and behavior. Chivalry.

So, why is the character based on Vita called Orlando?In the history of European literature, the literary character "Orlando" was first seen in the epic poem "Orlando in Love" (1495) by the Italian writer M·M·Boiardo (Matteo Maria Boiardo), and later in the Italian writer L·Ario. It appears again in Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando the Mad (1516). "Crazy Orlando" is regarded as the sequel to "Orlando in Love". This Orlando is a famous heroic paladin during the time of Charlemagne, very much like a replica of "Roland" in "Song of Roland".In "Crazy Orlando", in addition to describing his romantic and legendary adventures as a paladin, there is a very important narrative thread, which is Orlando's deep but wishful love for the exotic princess Angelina.In the end, Angelina empathized with others, abandoned Orlando, and followed others, and Orlando fell into madness.This is quite similar to the hero's love experience with the Russian princess Sasha.Of course, what is more similar is the temperament and charm of both hardness and softness, iron bones and soft heart, pure love and romance. "Crazy Orlando" is a work with far-reaching influence in the history of European literature. It was translated into English and published in England in 1591. The other two English translations of the book were also published in England in 1757 and 1784.In the following nineteenth and twentieth centuries, new English translations continued to come out, which had a certain influence on British writers.The image of Orlando's combination of hardness and softness, innocence and frankness, has repeatedly appeared in European literature and art, and has been written into operas and music.In Woolf's Victorian era and later Britain, although the legends of Charlemagne and paladins have been replaced by legends of King Arthur and his knight heroes, the image of Orlando-style knights who are heroic, poetic, romantic and tender Still a beloved of English poets, writers and artists.Therefore, Vita is called Orlando, perhaps because Orlando’s noble status in historical legends gives legitimacy to the hero’s identity, and secondly, Orlando’s chivalry in the epic matches Vita’s temperament and temperament very well.

Of course, Woolf believes that every person in the world contains many selves in the ontology, as she wrote in, a person may have thousands of selves.Then, the prototype of Orlando may also be composed of multiple components. In addition to Vita, it may also be the noble knight Orlando in the epic, or the composite image of Woolf's many friends.From Woolf's new perspective on biography, the prototype of the biographer can also be the biographer himself - Woolf.Woolf once said that in the new biography she tried, the most complete and most delicate character was the image of the author himself.She believes that biographers can imagine themselves as the hero in the process of writing.In the novel, Woolf sometimes comes to the front stage as a biographer, expressing his own views on the biography, the subject, time, life, love and literature, and sometimes hides himself in the text to communicate with the subject's life. Pulsating into one.Therefore, the image of Orlando reflects Woolf's own inner world in many ways. In other words, as a biographer, when Woolf integrates himself with the hero, his own figure passes through the hero's inner world. faintly visible.To some extent, it can also be seen as an aria written by Woolf for her spiritual world.Through the writing of this biography, Woolf expresses his admiration for nature, as well as his unique views on psychological time and real time, literature and love, life and death, transvestism and social gender.Her celebration of androgyny is expressed in Orlando's portrayal of the male-female, male-female character.Through Orlando, readers may also hear Woolf's scathing criticism of the spirit of the times, Victorian English literature, empire and modernity in a cynical tone.When readers enter Orlando's spiritual world, what they experience is Woolf's mental journey.

As a translator, the image of Orlando is intertwined with that of Woolf throughout the translation process, especially when entering Orlando's inner world, one can feel the beating noble, sensitive, innocent and poetic heart , belongs to Woolf.Translation is a pleasant spiritual journey, as if living alone with the protagonist in the manor in the secluded part of the valley. On a quiet night, walking on the promenade with candles, Orlando's different selves are presented to me one by one. The world and history of the world slowly unfolded before me.Woolf's book is written for people who understand her, and I hope I am one of those people who understand her.